She’s out of breath. She must have seen me as I passed through the senior hall and run after me the whole way from there.
“Hey,” she says. “Gimme a minute.” She bends over, her hands on her knees, her breath coming in quick bursts, and I wonder how she sings the way she does if jogging down a hallway winds her like this.
I say, “Valeria, I gotta go.”
I turn and open the door to the library, but she follows me in. “Wait,” she says.
“What?” I whisper. Ms. White, the librarian, shushes us anyway.
She looks behind her, like she’s making sure no one else hears what she’s about to say. But the library is nearly empty because most people are in class, and the halls are too since first period starts in just a few minutes.
“I’ve been looking for you all morning,” Valeria says. She pulls the ponytail holder out of her hair and twists her giant curls into a messy topknot, roughly securing it like an animal she needs to tame. “I thought you were in Mr. Yoon’s homeroom?”
“I am. I was in the bathroom for most of the period,” I tell her. Sydney and Willa’s concerned faces flash in my mind but I force them away.
“Oh,” she says. “Well.” She smooths the sides of her head and tucks errant strands into the bun.
Valeria has maybe said three words to me since Layla joined chorus, but she’s always seemed nicer than the other girls. I sigh through my nose, because if she ran all the way down the hall to tell me something, the least I can do is listen.
“Don’t freak,” she says, slipping her thumbs behind the yellow straps of her backpack. “But I’m pretty sure my cousin started the rumor about your dad.”
YOU DESERVED TO KNOW
I’ve never been in a fight before.
I’m not really the fighting type. I like books and jazz-age music and hugs. And I’ll admit I like talking shit, but rarely do I do it to anyone’s face.
But Sloane is testing my nonviolent nature for the second time in the span of a few months. She is still changing things about my world that I knew to be true: that Layla and I would be friends forever; that people are basically good. And she is dangerously close to making me into the kind of girl I never thought I’d be: the kind of girl who punches other girls right in the face.
“What,” I say to Valeria, hoping that I heard her wrong, though my what doesn’t sound like a question. My next sentence is punctuated with hard blinks and pauses between my words. “What. Do. You. Mean?”
Valeria is speechless at first. And the longer she doesn’t answer, the more I start putting things together myself.
Sloane swore she would get revenge for letting Todd into her house back in October. She threatened me, if only with a look and an implication, and so for a while I was expecting some kind of retaliation. Once everything happened with Layla, I’d thought it was over. But she waited until my guard was down before she attacked for real because she’s pure evil. Still, I feel like I’m missing something.
“I don’t know how else to say it,” Valeria mutters. “I’m almost positive it was her. She’s had it out for you for months, Cleo. You know that as well as I do. And when she found out you were the person who sent that email about Todd…”
“Wait. How does she know I sent the email?” I realize too late that I’ve just admitted to it; that if there was any question that I hadn’t sent it, that uncertainty is gone. Valeria doesn’t even blink.
“Sloane had this theory for a while that it was you. And then, the other night, she was on Layla’s phone looking through her texts and saw that Layla had texted you basically the whole story the night of the Halloween party. She threw Layla’s phone against the wall, and they were screaming at each other in my room so much that I thought they were going to literally kill each other. It was a mess. But now they seem fine and Sloane’s not mad anymore and today this rumor surfaces? It seems too convenient not to be connected. It seems like Sloane.”
I pace a little and Valeria just stands there as I process everything. That’s what she and Layla were fighting about—my email and all the big truths and tiny lies I told. That Layla had given me the information that became my only weapon against Sloane. And now Sloane was trying to ruin me, just the way I’d ruined her. The only difference is my email only hurt one life, temporarily. Her text could hurt two, for good.
“Why are you telling me this?” I ask, because Valeria is Sloane’s cousin. She should hate me for sending that email and airing all of her relative’s dirty laundry.
Valeria shrugs. “Sending that email was wrong. But her saying this about your dad is next-level evil. I can’t get with it, and even though Sloane’s my cousin, she’s always been kind of a bitch. Besides, I never spoke up while everything was happening in December. I didn’t, like, contribute, but I didn’t stop it either. My mom always says If you grin, you’re in, and I never got what she meant until now.” Valeria takes a deep breath and fiddles with a tiny stuffed monkey hanging from her backpack strap. “Anyway, I thought you deserved to know,” she says without meeting my eyes.
I nod.
“What are you going to do?” she says. I’m so sick of people asking me that, but I swallow hard and look right at her.
I used to have Layla to fight my battles, but I haven’t had her for a while. I think it’s about time I learn to fight for myself. “Thanks for telling me, but now this is between me and Sloane,” I say. I force myself to smile.
“Since your cousin knows about the email, she should know by now—I’m not a girl to be fucked with.”
then: December, week 3
WHAT’S DONE CANNOT BE UNDONE
Just like I’d hoped, by Monday, everyone in school knew Sloane’s deepest secrets. But I hadn’t predicted how awful people whispering about her would make me feel.
While I was at my locker, I heard someone say that after everything with Todd had happened, Sloane had attempted suicide, which was not something I put in the email. “Who told you that?” I asked the girl I heard say it, but she wouldn’t reveal her source.
In the bathroom, I heard people whispering that Sloane’s father had gotten a restraining order against Todd and that if he violated it, he could be arrested (that part was one of my lies).
By lunch I’d heard everything—from one version where the cops broke up Sloane’s Halloween party to one in which Sloane’s parents actually pressed charges against Todd and he had to drop out of college because his parents needed his tuition money to pay lawyers’ fees. I was horrified. But as Shakespeare wrote, What’s done cannot be undone, so I just gritted my teeth, waiting for what I knew was coming.